EnjoyMyMedia Creates Family Channels for Sharing

My posts on kids and privacy turned up some good recommendations for alternative ways to share photos, video, and other media with family and friends. I've been trying out one of them—EnjoyMyMedia—and I've found it to be a simple and effective way to share photos and other media with my parents.

EnjoyMyMedia allows you to privately share photos, videos, and documents with family and friends who are not at ease with photo-sharing site log-ins or interested in signing up on several photo sites or social networks. "It's absolutely targeted to people who are not tech savvy and are not hip 20 year olds," says Keith Loris, president and CEO of EnjoyMyMedia.

Setting up a "channel" takes only a few minutes. Recipients do not need to download anything, but to create a channel that can be distributed through an RSS feed, you'll need to download a transmitter. Think of it as a free personal broadcasting system that transforms a folder on your PC into a channel that feeds the folder's contents to invited recipients through Really Simple Syndication (RSS). In the folder can be photos, videos, audio, documents (scanned report cards, poems, etc.) Anything you want to share about your family with a chosen, private audience.

Once you create the folder, you choose who you want to invite to see the contents on an ongoing basis. When they get your email invite, they click on the link to subscribe, and then choose where they want to view it—their My Yahoo! page, Google homepage, Facebook, My MSN, My AOL, or via a web browser bookmark. Following simple directions, it takes three clicks to make your "netcast" an RSS feed in the place they choose to view it.

My parents have a "Dory's Family" netcast on their My Yahoo! page, and my mom loves it. They've had trouble downloading photos I've sent via email in the past, and they're not crazy about signing up on photo sites, so this is a great solution. I transmitted a folder with photos from my daugther's 8^th grade semi-formal, my son's baseball games and jazz ensemble concert, and my 4^th grader's Battle of the Books day at school. I think we've hit on something that works well for them.

EnjoyMyMedia makes little sense for people comfortable with wonderful photo-sharing sites such as Flickr or Shutterfly, or the plethora of family social networks. Another nice feature is it's not a one-time distribution of photos or a video. You can refresh the channel as often as you want. "The goal here is to share on an ongoing basis," Loris says.

Related:
Baby Pics on the Net: Public or Private? 
Readers: More Ways to to Privately Share Kids' Images